The Vanity and Jest series comes together by mirroring and arranging photographs, before disrupting these newly-created images with a series of different alterations. As the viewer observes the utterly unreal landscapes that continuously remind them of their other-worldliness, through illusions created by mirroring, the alterations made to the image strive to convince the viewer otherwise. The aim is to have the audience doubt their perceptions, while observing the dysfunctionality of the landscapes.

As Jonathan Crary states in Techniques of the Observer ‘Thus the imperatives of capitalist modernisation while demolishing the field of classical vision, generated techniques for imposing visual attentiveness, rationalising sensation, and managing perception… They were disciplinary techniques that required a notion of visual experience as instrumental, modifiable, and essentially abstract, and that never allowed a real-world to acquire solidity or permanence.

The series hales from Crary’s discourse and mirrors the duality of its name. Vanity is the usage of beliefs and rituals for worldly desires, while jest is the subtle emotion that lies in the spiritual core of humanity, a sort of comedy that celebrates the moment. Vanity and Jest embellishes worldly realities, while stripping them of modern interests, trying to find a new window, from which to to look at the modernised world.

Osman Nuri İyem

6-16 October 2022

Kale Design and Art Center

Open every day 10:30 -19:00

(except Mondays)